As its title suggests, this is a
book about love.  It is based on a series of lectures that Frankfurt delivered
in 2000 and 2001, at Princeton University and University College, London, respectively. 
It is short (slightly more than 100 pages) with three long chapters.  It is a
philosophical book, written by an excellent and influential philosopher and
dealing primarily with problems associated with love as they appear not just in
personal life but in writings about the philosophy and psychology of love.

The book is not for philosophers
only.  Those in mental health fields who are enthused, or at any rate,
receptive, to learning from a primarily conceptual rather than empirical
discussion, will discover that Frankfurt has a lot to say about what love contributes
to the meaning and importance of life.

Frankfurt generates concern for the
topic of love by asking, how should we live our lives?  Frankfurt does not mean
this to be a moral question.  Morality provides, he writes, "at most only
a severely limited and insufficient answer to the question of how a person
should live" (7).  Moral ideals are not overriding (8).  Rather we should
live our lives by understanding "what it is that we . . .  really care
about," and ideally by being decisive and confident about what we really
care about (28).  Love, in particular, is an especially important form of
caring.  Love, Frankfurt claims, "is the creator both of inherent or
terminal value and of importance" (56).

For Frankfurt the best or purest
form of love is self-love.  He refers to the New Testament’s Second Commandment
that we should love our neighbor as we love ourselves as sharing his conviction
that self-love is an especially helpful model or ideal for love in general.  As
Frankfurt understands self-love, it is unlike selfishness or self-indulgence
and dissimilar to the sort of moral achievement of self-reverence and
self-respect proposed by, say, Richard Garrett in an insightful paper on
self-love and neighbor love [‘Love’s way’ in Person to Person, eds. G.
Graham and H. LaFollette. Temple University Press, 1989, pp. 124-45].  It is a
mode of self-caring and shares four features which Frankfurt describes as
definitive of the love that, he believes, gives meaning to our lives.  These
are:

• Concern for the existence and good of the beloved for its
  own sake and not for some ulterior purpose.
• Commitment to the particularity of what is loved; the
  beloved cannot be replaced.
• Investment in what is loved, suffering in the beloved’s
  failures and profiting from its successes.
• Non-voluntariness; one cannot decide to love and therein
  love.

Frankfurt is impatient with morally
infused conceptions of love.  "The function of love", he claims, "is
not to make people good" (99). (Whether this sentiment is compatible with his
assertion that love is concern for the good of the beloved depends on what is
meant by the word ‘good’.)  He suggests that "being dreadfully and
irredeemably wicked" is compatible with love including self-love (98).

The best love, for Frankfurt, is
wholehearted (95). Wholehearted love is love without any reverberating
subjective uncertainties.  It is solid, secure, and convinced, with clarity of
purpose and direction.  "There is no equivocation" in the
wholehearted lover’s "devotion to his beloved" (95).  Frankfurt believes
that wholehearted love offers human beings the best chance of flourishing or
thriving as persons.  This is primarily because it represents freedom from
perturbation in one’s forms of caring.  Not for Frankfurt is a love with "ample
room for fatigue and ambivalence" (to use a phrase of John Updike) or the unpredictable
emotional landslide or turmoil that leaves one breathless in love.  Not for
him, too, are the unconfident doubts of a person not at home within herself. 
It is too bad that I am not prettier or taller or more smart or handsome, we may
whisper to ourselves.  Or is it truly bad?, we may ambivalently counter.  Some
theorists take decisional ambivalence and indecisive self-assessment to be
central to our situated freedom as persons, perhaps reflecting a plurality of
incomparable objects of personal care and importance.  Not Frankfurt.  Admiring,
contrarily, the philosophical repose that Bertrand Russell claimed to find in contemplating
the necessary certainties of mathematics, Frankfurt asserts that confident
caring and loving, if we are lucky enough to love in a confident manner, liberates
us from the debilitation of being "unsure what to think" (65), lest
we flounder.

Frankfurt is an eloquent defender
of love that is confident and decisive.  Of course, not every reader will be
convinced.  Some may prefer to think of love (even ideal human love) as containing
or at least permitting episodes of troubling disturbance and bouts of
ambivalence.  Regardless, however, of whether one accepts his vision of ideal
love, this is a probing and subtle book from an insightful thinker.  It is
filled with challenging arguments and interesting distinctions.  I recommend
it.

© 2004 George Graham

George Graham teaches philosophy at Wake
Forest University in North Carolina.  In addition to many articles on the
philosophy of mind and philosophical psychopathology, he has authored or edited
several books.  During 2004-2005 he is President of the Society for Philosophy
and Psychology. 

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology